Image Details

ANTIQUARIAN IMAGES / ALAMY

NOT SO LITTLE. This lithograph of a painting by David Roberts dated April 6, 1839, captures his firsthand encounter with the early modern village of Bethlehem. Such depictions of the town in the modern era, which portray it as a diminutive pastoral hamlet in the Judean hill country, clearly entered the public imagination and led to the common assumption that ancient Bethlehem was similarly small and rural. But the ancient evidence may belie this view. Major civic works, such as an aqueduct system that runs through the heart of the city, suggest that the Bethlehem of Jesus’s time was a bustling urban center.